The field of the present disclosure relates generally to weather modification and, more specifically, to systems and methods of inducing rainfall with an aerial vehicle.
Water shortages and drought have recently been increasing in frequency and duration in certain regions of the world. Drought can be caused by a variety of factors such as low precipitation, lack of moisture in air, unsuitable temperatures for facilitating condensation of moisture in the air, improper timing of water availability, or decreased access to water supplies. Regardless of the cause, drought can have severe economic and ecological consequences on affected regions. At least some known responses to drought focus primarily on short-term solutions such as temporary water conservation and increased use of groundwater. However, such temporary solutions will generally be ineffective or insufficient to counteract the effects of long-term water shortages.
At least some known efforts at counteracting the effects of water shortages and drought have focused on weather modification techniques such as cloud seeding and cloud ionization. Cloud seeding includes injecting particles of silver iodide or other suitable substances from an aircraft into the atmosphere, which enables moisture to collect on the particles, freeze, and fall to the ground in the form of water. However, cloud seeding is generally costly and its effectiveness limited by particle supply and flight time of the aircraft injecting the particles into the atmosphere. Cloud ionization includes radiofrequency antennas that emit negatively charged ions into the atmosphere. In theory, the negatively charged ions will increase the likelihood that supercooled droplets of moisture will collide with a frozen nuclei, thus becoming rain. However, the effectiveness of ground-based cloud ionization is debatable.